UE5: Making a Cable Tool in Geometry Script // Unreal Engine Tutorial
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 พ.ย. 2022
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Epic's Geometry Script plugin allows to achieve fast, responsive procedural generation. This example takes a spline drawn by the user, then snaps it to the ground, matching the underlying geometry precisely.
This is absolute gold. I made something like this a few years ago in UE4 for a monorail track system that hugged the landscape. But combining this with GeometryScript is the natural evolution, and something I just haven't had time to try yet. However, I need responsive cables for my latest project so thanks for saving me having to unarchive an old project and remind myself how to transform spline points into world space (that bit took me days to figure out in 2017!).
Your work is so important, please keep it up!
Thanks James! It's actually a good reminder to check some older ideas that didn't fully work. Because maybe some blockers are gone now, in new tech
This is exactly what I wanted !! thank you so much Tech Art Aid !!
Thanks! Really like the way you resolve it.
Nice seeing you in New Orleans! (I'm the person who walked by exclaiming 'Tech Art Aid on the bus!' after the party.) 😀
Ha :D btw if you'd like to join Discord, with some folks you may have met at Fest, here we are: discord.gg/4BRNBpU
Man, your geo script stuff is going to be crazy
Thanks :) new one: snow + ice www.patreon.com/posts/74904761
Гениально!
Спасибо!
I want to become a tech artist and didn't know where to start until I stumbled upon your channel.
You're such an inspiration, thank you! :)
btw. when creating procedural tools, do you prefer Geometry Script instead of using Houdini? Houdini is such a massive software package and I'm not sure if I should spend my time also learning that.
Thanks! Knowing Houdini is more useful at this point. You don't need to master all of it :) just focus on procedural mesh editing for example
I suggest on the false branch adding the non-blocking hits the array but with original location, this makes the cables work within the air too and only snaps if it finds a surface near by.
'Append Sweep Polyline' leaves a gap in the mesh for me but 'Append Sweep Polygon' fixes this.
I would love if there was a way to somehow simulate gravity and cable tension similar to how some other tools do it but I know this is asking for a lot.
"on the false branch adding the non-blocking hits the array but with original location, this makes the cables work within the air too and only snaps if it finds a surface near by". How would you go about doing this? This is exactly the functionality I need but very new to BPs so not sure how to do this!
@@user-cu9so5tn8j @25 Mins it has the tracing section, under break hit result: drag off "blocking hit" and add a branch, this allows us to do two separate actions depending on the result.
You want to do what he does for true.
On false it's almost the same setup but we don't want to modify it, we only want to 'add array' for spline points projected. Grab the transform from 'spline original' coming out of the 'foreach each loop' and plug it into this add to array. This grabs our point in space but without changing it and adds it to the list (array).
This should now create that desired outcome of course there is plenty of extra stuff you could add but this will get you started.
@@robotinfluence Thanks for the response! I created an Add to Array node from the False end of the Branch node, then plugged in the Array Element Transform from the For Each Loop into the Add to Array's Target Array (it also created a Make Array node), but it didn't give me the result I was expecting. I can't raise my spline into the air without it still snapping to the ground. I've probably misunderstood though!
Ah I wish it said somewhere this was for 5.1, as I cannot find the Poly Path function library in 5.0.
Ohh. Good point then
If somebody (like me) can't find the correct blueprint class in the beginning, enable Geometry Processing plugin first.
Thank you very much for the video! I have a project that I have a physics enabled wire component. It does not have a visual but it dynamically updates a spline at every tick with variable amount of nodes. I see that using spline mesh is more suitable for level editing that the wire stays static during the play, but maybe it is too heavy to use spline mesh for a spline that updates every tick. So I took a page from CableComponent and go even lower level to manually generate vertices from CPU on the VBO of a mesh. But still it is not perfect. Because the CableComponent plugin needs a fixed amount of spline nodes to allocate the VBO but for dynamic amount of spline nodes I need to frequently reallocate VBO. I am thinking go even lower to the geometry shader level to generate the wire mesh on GPU directly. Do you have any good advice on that?
Congratulations for perseverance and trying next methods! Geometry shaders are unfortunately kinda outdated these days :< (see Factorio blog post about them). I'd guess you could generate a vertex list on CPU, then either: send this somehow (I don't know how) as vertex data for the GPU draw call, or call Geometry Script via C++ giving it the updated list of vertices. But I haven't done either of these things, so that's all I know
Hey, I was just wondering if there is a way to retain the scale from the original spline after snapping to a surface? I wanted to keep the ability to increase the scale of the sweep geometry, by scaling up the control points on the original spline; but this seems to be lost after snapping it to the surface.
Great tutorial by the way, super helpful!
Thanks! If the number of points hasn't changed, you should be able to read the transform->scale of the original points by the same indexes
@@TechArtAid Thank you, I've managed to get it working as desired! Thanks for the reply
Could you make tutorial, wood planks generator using geometry script? Deforming, Twist, Change Size etc.
Ha, one person has asked about it recently :3 Let's do it some day! I'm adding it #next-stream-ideas on Discord. discord.gg/4BRNBpUVbD
is there any wat to put a simple geomtry scritp on android mobile?
Android build doesn't seem to be working with this, any ideas?
That is totally missing from UE! Is this blueprint purchasable?
It's part of my Unreal Project Files techartaid.com/products/
of course it's just a raw copy of the scene I shown in the video. not "user-friendly" ;) but good enough for learning it
Does this work for ue4 too?
UE5 only, 5.1+ ideally
The circle path isn't closed for me despite doing the exact same thing. Anyone an idea, what might cause this?
I had the same problem, it was annoying... I decided to look at the comments to see if there was a solution, and I found it in a comment from 5 months ago. In fact, you need to replace Append Sweep Polyne with Append Sweep Polygon. I've just tested it and it works great!
@@twilatson8521 nice, thank you very much!